


A Ghost of a Chance

by misura



Category: Chuck (TV), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Halloween, M/M, Pre-Slash, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-16
Updated: 2011-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-24 16:39:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Wait," Chuck says, "is that a real shotgun? Because it kind of looks like a real shotgun," and then the guy - he might be Sean or Sam or whatever, is pointing his kind-of-looks-like-a-real shotgun in his direction and Chuck's thinking that if he dies here and now, the name of Chuck Bartowski's probably going to go down in Stanford history as 'the guy whose ghost is haunting the library'.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A Ghost of a Chance

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [fusionfest](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/fusionfest) collection. 



> prompt: _A Haunting At Stanford. Pretty please, with your choice of topping on top?_
> 
>  _(Would love it if there were some Sam/Chuck/Bryce.)_
> 
>  _(But if slash is not your thing, I'd love a gen story too!)_
> 
> As such, much more crossover than fusion, and alas, no threesomeness accomplished. Also, I'm going to go straight ahead and spoil you by saying that THIS IS NOT A GHOST STORY. It does take place at Stanford during Halloween, though. Partially.

It's Halloween, 2002, twelve minutes past midnight (give or take a few seconds) and Chuck's pretty sure that either there really is a ghost in the library or there's some guy who's overheard him and Bryce planning their annual Ghosthunters!Gotcha! match and decided to drop in.

He's not sure which is the less likely option, except that then Bryce, who's generally better at iniative rolls, dives behind a table the way they do it on TV, points his gun and tells the ghost-or-intruder to lower his weapon. Which is when Chuck notices that, yup, the guy's carrying.

It's kind of reassuring in the sense that Chuck's pretty sure ghosts don't usually walk around armed. Of course, neither do students, but then, _Bryce_ is carrying a (fake) gun, so why not this guy, too?

"Put it on the floor and step away. Slowly. With your hands on your head."

Either Bryce has secretly been watching a whole lot more police procedurals than Chuck (give him SciFi over CSI any day), or his family's big on law enforcement. Or something. Chuck figures he might as well break cover himself - for moral support, if nothing else.

Up close, the guy looks sort of familiar. Blond. Not really tall. Also, Chuck can't help but notice: not really in the process of doing what Bryce is telling him to do. Chuck takes another few steps, figuring he might remember a name at some point, take the tension out of the situation.

Bryce sounds like he's losing his cool a bit, which makes sense. Chuck figures he might feel kind of silly in Bryce's position, too. It's tricky to stay in-character with someone who's clearly not in on the game.

"Uh, hi." No reaction, unless you count Bryce scowling at him, like - yeah, you're welcome, buddy.

Another few steps give him a pretty good look at both the guy and the weapon he's still holding.

"Wait," Chuck says, "is that a real shotgun? Because it kind of looks like a real shotgun," and then the guy - he might be Sean or Sam or whatever, is pointing his kind-of-looks-like-a-real shotgun in his direction and Chuck's thinking that if he dies here and now, the name of Chuck Bartowski's probably going to go down in Stanford history as 'the guy whose ghost is haunting the library', which, okay, yeah, _nice_. Aside from the whole part where he got shot in the library by some crazy person.

Bryce looks like he's bracing himself to shoot someone. Chuck would give him full marks for realism except that he might be about to get shot by, well, a _real_ gun. With _real_ bullets, and everything.

There's this kind of clicking sound that Chuck figures is supposed to be 'taking the safety off a gun'. Bryce has really gone all out this time. Chuck would have prefered the sound of a cellphone being used to dial Security, but okay. Maybe Bryce has done that already - quietly, to lure Chuck's might-be murdered into a false sense of safety. Maybe.

"I'd uh really like not to die?" Chuck tries.

Miraculously, that actually seems to work. "You're not a ghost," the guy says, lowering his shotgun until it points at Chuck's feet which, okay, still a bad place for a bullet.

"Yeah." Chuck thinks he might faint, which would be seriously uncool. "No kidding."

Bryce puts up his gun - complete with a 'putting the safety back on' sound. Totally cool.

"Sam Winchester," the guy says, holding out his hand.

Chuck shakes it. His legs feel like they're made of rubber. Sam turns away to introduce himself to Bryce, so Chuck figures there's no harm in closing his eyes for just a moment, until the world's gotten a bit steadier.

 

When he opens them again, they're back at the dorm. He's on his bed, fully dressed, while Bryce is sitting on his bed ( _sans_ shirt, for some reason) and Sam is sitting on Bryce's computer chair.

" - check it out," Sam is saying. "Just in case."

Bryce looks like Sam is his newest favorite professor, which would be all right with Chuck, except that Sam is definitely a student. "Hey."

"It's aliiiive," Bryce says, but he's grinning as he says it. "Welcome back."

Chuck gets up, feeling like an idiot. "Thanks, I think."

"Careful there, buddy." Bryce's hands are warm and steady. It's tempting to pretend to still be a bit woozy, just so Bryce will keep touching him, and one of these days, Chuck's really going to have to talk to someone about that, because he's pretty sure he's slightly crossing the line between wanting to be friends and wanting something else here. (Or maybe he just needs a girlfriend.)

Sam stays where he is. He does look a bit concerned - as he should, given that Chuck's state is mostly his fault. "So uh, hey. Bringing a shotgun into the library. What was that all about, huh?"

Bryce doesn't look at Chuck like Chuck's his newest favorite professor. At least he looks, though.

"This is going to sound pretty crazy, but I thought there might be, you know, an actual ghost in there." Sam looks sheepish. He also looks like he's a big, fat liar - or at the very least like he'd hiding something, but Chuck can't really think of a good way to bring that up.

"Oh." Suspect there's a ghost, bring in a shotgun? Ladies and gentlemen, we've got a crazy person.

"It's loaded with rocksalt," Sam says, as if he's reading Chuck's mind.

"Right."

"My family - I've got a license and everything." Chuck wonders what the original sentence was going to be. My family is deeply superstitious and also a bit insane? "For the gun, I mean." Sam looks at Bryce when he says it. Bryce looks back. "I think I should go now. Sorry again."

"See you around." Bryce gets up and walks Sam to the door. Chuck would like to think it's just to make sure Sam and his shotgun actually leave the building.

 

Chuck isn't entirely sure how almost shooting someone in the library qualifies Sam for getting invited to the Movie Night After Halloween. Bryce does the inviting and (typically) forgets to tell Chuck about it until Sam's already there.

So much for any vague, half-formed plans Chuck may or may not have had for using the scary movies as an excuse to hold Bryce's hand in a completely platonic, buddy-to-buddy sort of way.

(The part where he shrieks like a girl several times wasn't really planned on, and it also doesn't really help him with his back-up plan, which was to look more interesting than Sam.)

 

"So," Chuck says over pizza, on what feels like one of the few times Sam _isn't_ around, "what's with you and Sam?" He probably sounds jealous. He's not sure that he isn't. It's been two weeks since Halloween, and Sam seems to be steadily becoming a fixed part of what used to be Bryce-and-Chuck time.

Bryce looks like he's trying to come up with a slick story. Most people don't notice it when Bryce does that - Bryce can be a pretty slick liar, but Chuck's not most people. "What do you mean?"

"Well, gee, maybe it's the way it's almost like you're dating or something." Chuck's not sure if he sounds jealous, or just kind of homophobic. He hopes Bryce knows he's not homophobic, although given the circumstances, perhaps it would be better if Bryce would think that.

He expects Bryce to mention Claire, his last girlfriend, or Laura (his second-to-last) or Honey-please-call-me-Hanna, and how Chuck never particularly minded them. Instead, Bryce looks him straight in the eye and says: "We're not dating."

And Chuck is secretly Santa Claus. "It's okay. You can tell me."

"Chuck, we're not dating." Bryce looks serious. Sincere. "Honestly."

"You act like you are." It comes out sounding half like an accusation and half like a complaint.

Bryce's expression turns a little annoyed. "Look, I can't talk about it, all right? Just trust me. Or not. Your choice."

It's not much of a choice, Chuck thinks. "What does that mean: you can't talk about it?"

 

What it means, apparently, is that Sam will be waiting for Chuck after class. He's not carrying a shotgun and he doesn't look like he's about to drag Chuck off to some quiet place to beat him up, so there's that, at least.

"Hey."

"Hey," Chuck says. "Um, Bryce isn't in this class."

"I know," Sam says. "I just thought maybe we should talk."

"Oh."

Sam doesn't seem particularly happy to be there. That makes two of them.

"The two of you are hitting it off pretty well, huh?" Chuck volunteers, by way of breaking the ice.

"You know, I actually came here to get away from people like him," Sam says, at more or less the same time, thus providing Chuck with the perfect excuse to pretend not to have heard him.

Not that it requires any sort of acting to come up with an honest reply. "Um, what?"

"I came here because I didn't want to live that kind of life." Sam's tone indicates it's a clarification.

Chuck's brains experience it as a further muddying of the issue. "What kind of life?"

"Being a Hunter," Sam says. Chuck can hear the capital H, even if he doesn't understand it. "You know, fighting the things that come out of the dark. The things most people think only exist in stories."

Chuck manages not to point out that maybe that's because a lot of things only _do_ exist in stories.

"It's nice to have someone to talk to about stuff like that."

"Yeah," Chuck says. "I suppose it must be."

 

Bryce doesn't look particularly impressed when Chuck reports back.

"Your not-boyfriend is crazy, did you know that?" Chuck thinks it's kind of a big deal. Crazy people are, well, they're crazy. Unsafe to be around. Not more fun to hang around with than best friends.

"He's got several fake IDs," Bryce says, and his tells all point to a slick lie, but Chuck feels this is actually the most sensible thing Bryce has said about Sam for quite a long while.

Chuck's got one fake ID, and it's not even really fake. It's just a piece of paper that proclaims him to be a member of the JLA. "Really? Why?"

Bryce shrugs. "Seemed fun to try and find out."

"What, like you're a spy or something?" Chuck chuckles. Secret agents have never really been his kind of roles - Bond is great, yes, super for movie night, but Chuck would rather be a Vulcan than a member of MI5 any day of the week. "Come on, Bryce."

Bryce looks away. A bit embarrassed, maybe.

"We're not spies, all right?" Chuck says. "And that guy - well, he's kind of crazy. If it bothers you he's got a fake ID, just report him to campus security or something. That's what normal people do. Sheesh."

"You'd look pretty good in a tux, I bet," Bryce says with a faint smile.

It's a bit of a change in subject, but Chuck figures he's made his point. Stay away from crazy people. Do not encourage them by pretending you are one of them. "Thanks. So would you. In fact, you'd probably look better than me."

"Why, Mr. Bartowski, do you expect me to blush?"

"But no, Mr. Larkin, I expect you to - um, give me a moment here."

Bryce laughs, which was more or less the goal, anyway, so Chuck gives up on finding a proper verb to end his line with.

 

 _epilogue_

"Christ, Sammy. There's like - what, hundreds of people around, and you have to go and pick the one guy who's CIA to get up, close and personal with?"

Sam looked out of the car window. Same old landscape. "I thought he was like me."

"Well, got that right," Dean grumbled. "Hey, you figure we can tell someone about him? I mean, must be some people out there who've got it in for spies. Nothing to do with us."

Sam wondered how they were going to survive the trip home. Barely two hours, and he already wanted to strangle Dean. "Will you drop it already? I was wrong, all right? I thought I could do Stanford - you and Dad thought I couldn't, and as it turns out, I was wrong and the two of you were right. There. Are you happy now?"

Dean's turn to look out of the window, apparently. "Sorry things didn't work out."

"Not half as sorry as I am," Sam said, and then, because Dean was basically all right: "Thanks."


End file.
